Physical therapists and other health professionals such as physicians, chiropractors, and the like need to obtain precise and objective measurements of their patient's body skeletal structure. These precise measurements are necessary to help to determine the quality of function of a body by learning about its skeletal and related structure. Subtle deviations can exist in body structure that are of significance in the diagnosis of dysfunction that the eye of the practitioner itself might not see. Unless these subtle dysfunctions can be rapidly and repeatedly measured, therapists cannot monitor patient diagnosis and treatment progress objectively.
Present measurement techniques for the human body are not precise. Precision is necessary to increase accountability and objectivity of diagnosis and treatment. Further, precise measurements enable communication with third parties (other than therapist and patient). These third parties are most frequently insurance companies, lawyers, colleagues and other related medical professionals and medical groups all involved with the health care process and the vitally related reimbursement for treatment. When precision is lacking in describing dysfunction, questions as to the dysfunction and the treatment for the dysfunction frequently arise.
Further, present measurement techniques lacking accurate and quantitative measurement compound the difficulty of research.
Most health professionals operate under severe time limitations. There is a need for both improved accuracy and improved speed. Therefore, it is desired to have a precise measurement tool for skeletal measurement that operates through the skin and flesh that is easily handled by one person.
Body measurement tools have existed in the past. Generally, they consist of a pair of caliper arms attached in slidable and perpendicular relationship to a scaled straightedge. Thus the tool needs to be about as long as the distance that needs to be measured.
Unfortunately, with the use of such a tool, body landmarks that are poorly visible because they are obscured by a layer of skin and soft tissue need to be palpated before they can be measured. Loss of accuracy and time occurs in the period between the removal of the palpating fingers and the application of the measuring arms from the perpendicular straight edge to the area where measurement is of interest.
Another possibility and common practice in dealing with this type of landmarks is to mark the skin covering the landmarks with a pen after it has been palpated. Next, the measuring arms are applied to the pen marks on the skin. This introduces the possibility of additional inaccuracy, because the skin almost always moves relative to the landmarks.
Finally, and with linear arms protruding from a linear scale, each measurement requires multiple steps of unfastening, moving, refastening, and finally taking the measurement of the distance between the measured skeletal body parts.
Examples of the class of devices referred above to include Perrault U.S. Pat. No. 4,872,268 entitled SKELETON DEVICE and Phillips U.S. Pat. No. 4,201,226 entitled COMBINATION INSTRUMENT FOR TAKING BIOMECHANICAL MEASUREMENTS.
In another class of measurement devices, a floor mounted reference device in combination with calipers determines the angle of skeletal reference points by a combination of static measurement and trigonometry. Such calculation constitutes at a minimum an obstacle to rapid measurement.
An example of this type of measurement is described in "A Technique for Measuring Pelvic Tilt" by Sanders and Stavrakas, Physical Therapy, Volume 61, Number 1, January 1981.